ANGRY western Sydney motorists and commuters who battle clogged motorways, crowded trains and buses that simply don't turn up have vented their frustration.

The Daily Telegraph reported yesterday, as part of its "Fair Go For The West", campaign that more than 70 per cent of the 800,000 workers who live in western Sydney are forced to negotiate traffic snarls to get to work because there has not been enough government investment in accessible and reliable public transport.

And those who choose public transport must put up with trains and buses that sometimes don't stick to the timetable, are not air-conditioned and haven't been cleaned properly.

Many of the 70 readers who commented on the article told The Daily Telegraph of their daily horror stories of getting to, and home, from work.

Lis, who travels from the Central Coast to Bankstown each day, said the NSW Government's new rail timetable launched on October 20 means she now has to catch three separate trains each morning and evening.

"I now have to get up and catch a train that leaves 20 minutes earlier so that I can arrive at work the same time I used to.

"The State Government has been promising a fast train from Newcastle to Central for decades. The service is antiquated and poorly managed."

Source: DailyTelegraph

Lisa (Lisa), from Marrickville, said she was so exhausted by the six hours she has to spend on a train each day to travel to her workplace in Penrith that she decided to drive instead.

"I'm now tempted to move out here because Parramatta Road is a nightmare in the mornings, the M4 is just as bad in the AM as well as the PM and the trains, well the new timetable hasn't done anything. It still sucks."

Mark said that he drives from Penrith to Belmore each day.

"I take the M4 in the morning and go home via the Hume Hwy and Horsley Drive because the M4 is near impossible to get on to in the afternoon and evening. I reset the trip meter in my car each week. My average speed for the week is 38-40 kmh."

Peter reckons the current NSW Government is not solely to blame for the transport woes.

"I moved to Sydney over 40 years ago for work and traffic was crook then. OK, it's become worse but no one government is to blame. I've had to commute over an hour each way each day but I learned to put up with it. Some days it was 2 hours each way but that was just a fact of life of living in a metropolitan area."

Jodi, who has just moved back to Sydney from Brisbane, said local authorities should copy the transport examples of the Queensland capital and install more designated busways.

She said all roads, bar one, are government built and owned "so there are no tolls and none of this ridiculous PPP (public-private-partnership) crap like in Sydney.

"And expressways are planned to incorporate bus travel, not with private funding and promises to put more cars on them to make private companies rich," she said.

John says a second Sydney airport would cut down traffic travelling from the west to the east while Daniel believes that commuting is a "complete joke and in utter chaos".

Daniel said Premier Barry O'Farrell should urge bosses to let more people work from home.

NRMA president Wendy Machin said there had been under-investment in public transport infrastructure in western Sydney. But she said there now needed to be resources set aside for major road projects to complement new rail and bus projects.

"Lack of public transport has forced people on to the roads," Ms Machin said.

"Now the NSW government needs to invest in roads and public transport and try to make them work seamlessly together."

Road congestion is so bad that average speeds on the M4 and M5 motorways can drop as low as 40km/h during the morning peak, and the traffic is so thick that snarls can build up at a rate of 1.5km a minute.

Western Sydney Public Transport Users president Sue Day said local government wanted to help create local jobs but the state government was not providing enough local transport options to move people from suburb to suburb.

"Instead, the government is spending billions of dollars on big-ticket items like the WestConnex motorway that just funnels people out of western Sydney and makes them sit in their cars for three hours a day to get to work," Ms Day said.

Transport and planning consultant Alex Gooding said the car dominated because the rail system in western Sydney had remained largely unchanged since the 1930s. He said numerous new rail lines had been promised since then, but only 13km of new track had been built - the Olympic Park Link, East Hills Extension and Harris Park Y-link.

"But we have seen more than 100km of motorway, mostly tolled, and the promise of even more capacity to come," Mr Gooding said.

Some works are in progress, but long-suffering western Sydney residents will be forced to wait to see them come to fruition. Parramatta City Council is pushing for a Western Sydney Light Rail Network that will link Bankstown with Castle Hill, via Parramatta, with branch lines to employment hubs at Macquarie Park and Rhodes.

The NSW Government has promised a raft of road and public transport infrastructure projects designed to alleviate problems in western Sydney.

It is building WestConnex, a 33 kilometre motorway that will link Sydney's west with the CBD and the airport for the first time and slash travel a typical journey from Parramatta to the airport will be cut by 40 minutes, it promises.

A spokesman for Roads Minister Duncan Gay said WestConnex, to be complted in 2023, will avoid 52 sets of traffic lights and take 3,000 trucks a day off Parramatta Road, putting them underground.

Work on Westconnex will start early 2015 with the widening of the M4 which should be completed by earl 2017," the spokesman said.

"The Government is also widening the M5 West. The $400 million project is expected to be completed mid next year.

"The Government is investing $602 million in Western Sydney roads as part of the 2013-14 budget."

Projects include:

•$87 million to upgrade sections of Camden Valley Way to four lanes in 2015

•$43 million to continue work on the four lane upgrades of sections of the Great Western Highway in the Blue Mountains in 2014-15

•$22 million to continue work next year on the upgrade of Richmond Road between Bells Creek and Townson Road

•$11.5 million to start the upgrade of Old Wallgrove Road between the M7 and Erskine Park Link Road in 2016.

The NSW Government is also planning future upgrades of major routes including Bringelly, Richmond and The Northern roads as well as planning Stage One of the Werrington Arterial, between the M4 Motorway and the Great Western Highway.

The spokesman for Mr Gay, who is acting Transport Minister, said the government hopes to attract people back to public transport it with its new train timetable that provides more than 690 extra weekly services for Western Sydney.

"The new bus timetable will deliver more than 1200 extra weekly bus services for Western Sydney and extra ferry services are stopping along the Parramatta River."

Construction has started on the $8.3 billion North West Rail Link, to be completed by the end of 2019. It line with eight new stations will is designed to free up capacity

"The $2 billion South West Rail Link, due to be finished in 2015, will improve access to public transport for the people of south-west Sydney, providing a link to major employment centres including Liverpool, Parramatta and the Sydney CBD," the spokesman said.

She says the new Sydney Trains timetable introduced last month, which was spruiked as adding more than 400 extra northwestern Sydney weekly services, has done nothing to ease her daily grind.

"These new trains haven't helped at all because if I miss a train I'm late to work," she said at Blacktown station.

"In the afternoons if I miss a train I can't get home until really late. Yesterday my train got completely cancelled."

The 19-year-old spends $15 a day, equivalent to her hourly wage, on the daily commute and passes the time reading "a new book every week".

Quakers Hill IT worker Ray Morcos said there was no choice for western Sydney city workers but public transport due to the congested road network. "This timetable sucks. Not enough seating, trains run too infrequently and there's too many all stations,'' he said.

FOR Castle Hill commuters, the battle often begins before they even catch the bus to the city.

Personal assistant Eliza Zampieri said the lack of parking near the Castle Hill bus terminal meant she had to park in a timed spot and run the risk of getting a ticket.

"I have to drive and just hope I don't get a fine,'' the 24-year-old said.

But despite the lack of parking and long queues for the bus, it still beat the "putrid" traffic during peak hours, said Ms Zampieri, who is an occasional commuter.

When The Daily Telegraph caught the M61 at 7.52am to the city yesterday, it reached Wynyard in under an hour. The bus was full by the time it reached North Rocks, with about 10 passengers forced to stand. Traffic was light along the M2 and it wasn't until the service reached the southern side of the Harbour that it ran into the notorious bus traffic jam.

From there it took a further six minutes to travel the final 400m to Wynyard interchange, arriving at 8.48am.

UNIVERSITY student Meagan Skinner does not yet have a driver's licence, but she reckons she can do better than the bus driver she recently had on a nightmare trip on the 775 Busways route in the city's west.

Ms Skinner, 20, studies at the University of Technology in Sydney and works part-time as a shop assistant in Penrith, about a 20-minute drive from her home in Erskine Park. But her scheduled 40-minute journey to work can take as long as 90 minutes, depending on the traffic and the driver.

"A new timetable began last month and a lot of new drivers are doing the 775 service to Penrith,'' she said. "Some have been brought in from other areas and aren't familiar with the route. I had to shout out to a driver that he had just run through a red light. He was too busy concentrating on sticking to the route because he didn't know it very well."

Ms Skinner also has to cope with people yelling and fighting on the bus. "Public transport out here is a bit of a joke."

CJ SUMBAL is married to a courier driver working across western Sydney.

Every night she listens at the dinner table to his traffic congestion horror stories.

She ended up living the daily nightmare herself when she began travelling from their Merrylands home along the M4 Motorway to her 9-5 job in the CBD, where congestion is so bad speeds can drop as low as 40km/h and traffic can bank up for more than a kilometre. So frustrated at having to waste up to two hours a day battling the traffic, Ms Sumbal decided that she would look for a job that allowed her to leave home after the morning peak period was over.

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